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Comment Re:I remember when.... (Score 1) 153

One big difference, though: when you had to wait in line it was because there were so many people wanting tickets. In this case there's 5 people at the head of the line and each one bought thousands of tickets so there's none left for anyone else. Then they turned around and started selling to everyone else at 100x the price. If not for them, everyone else WOULD HAVE been able to get tickets at the regular price. Completely different situations.

Comment That's because the workplace counter-trains people (Score 5, Informative) 151

The abysmal results are because every workplace trains people to fall for phishing scams. That change in vacation policy? The real, legitimate notification of it will be in an email from an external bulk-mailing service telling employees to click on the link included. There's nothing in it to distinguish it from a phishing attempt, and employees are supposed to trust it.

Progress is going to require workplaces, schools etc. to:

  1. Send official mail from an internal address, not through any external service.
  2. Have all email cryptographically signed and email clients are set up to automatically verify signatures.
  3. Have information users need to know delivered through the organization's intranet site, with users directed to log in to that and check notifications for more information.

Comment An insoluble problem (Score 5, Interesting) 136

The problem is that for the studios behind the streaming services, the money isn't in the media itself. It's all in the subscription fees and advertising revenue and the ability to collect and mine data about the viewers. None of those things are available unless the viewers go to the studio's streaming service. Ironically, the things that would stop piracy in it's tracks are the very things the studios and streaming services can't afford to do because it'd bankrupt them.

Comment Not a bug (Score 2) 61

They'll have a hard time "fixing" this because it's not a bug. It's not even a feature. It's an inherent part of the design and it's working exactly as intended. And since it stems from the basic requirements, fixing it's going to require coming up with new requirements and developing a new design from there. Good luck with that considering the number of parties whose own requirements include "Must NOT follow those new requirements.".

Comment Re:They already do (Score 1) 35

The main difference is that those other mechanisms try to prevent the LLM from doing things. "Guilt" simulation takes a different approach: penalize the LLM (cost it points) based on the damage done to the other party. So in the Prisoner's Dilemma game, defecting causes the other player to suffer punishment (lost points) which in turn causes the LLM to lose points too. The LLM's trying to minimize point loss, so the idea is it'll look for strategies that avoid causing the other player to lose points as well as trying to minimize direct point loss and it'll do this through it's own programming rather than having external constraints that it could work around.

The obvious downside is this requires feedback to the LLM about the results it produced, which in turn requires it to keep a permanent memory of every user and it's history with them. Any breakdown or inconsistency in that feedback loop causes the outcomes to get worse rather than better.

Comment Probably not. (Score 1) 35

This is something easy to test by just setting up multiple AI agents and running the game. The optimal strategy is of course to always stand pat, say nothing and accept the minimal punishment when the other agent also stands pat. That, though, is only the case if all agents were programmed for "guilt" and if all interactions resulted in feedback based on the other agent's punishment. If any agent doesn't receive negative feedback for choosing to defect (isn't programmed for "guilt") or if feedback is sometimes not given, the other stable strategy is to always defect. My guess is that if they ran the simulation, that's where the agents would end up. I doubt the agents will figure out the "best" strategy, which is to initially stand pat and then return tit-for-tat until the other agent also starts doing that in which case switch back to standing pat. This requires being able to distinguish other agents from each other and memory of your history with a given other agent.

Comment Re:Meh (Score 1) 49

It's very critical additional data, though. The idea is the basic malware doesn't have anything truly alarming in it, so it's easier to obfuscate it to slip by the filters. Once it's running, it can download the really dangerous stuff via TXT records, which won't be checked for alarming/dangerous content, and set that up behind the filters without triggering them. It does all that in memory, without giving any indication of touching files, and then once the code's gotten root access it can persist things to files without triggering any alerts (because root's allowed to do that).

Comment Abuse of TXT records (Score 1) 49

This is compounded by the (ab)use of TXT records to store arbitrary records without needing to extend the set of DNS record types. Having explicit types of DNS records improves syntax filtering, making it difficult to impossible to abuse those records this way. Limiting TXT records to only their original purpose (instead of putting SPF, DMARC, DKIM and other types inside them) would allow heavy-handed filtering of attempts to pass arbitrary data in large quantities through TXT records without impacting any other services.

Comment Re:So something I don't think anyone is asking (Score 1) 52

Why do AIs keep putting fake citations into cases they generate? An AI just regurgitates what it finds in its data set after all...

No, they actually don't. What they do is regurgitate the sequence of tokens most likely to follow the current token based on a model generated from the training data. They certainly can regurgitate the exact contents of the training data set, but they can equally make up strings based on the model weights. That's what makes their output so pernicious: since it's what would likely follow, we see it as plausible and don't immediately flag it as something we need to check on. The only way to find the problems then is to check everything regardless of how plausible it appears to be.

Comment Re:Hybrids offer some interesting options for powe (Score 1) 363

Pretty close. They don't really have batteries, mostly they run directly off the generators and have very large radiators (just large fan-cooled resistors) to deal with excess power (like when braking when the traction motors are acting as generators). The drive-train's the same though, and the amount of traction they can get despite being steel wheels on steel rails says lots about how effective the results are.

Comment Hybrids offer some interesting options for power (Score 4, Interesting) 363

The biggest thing about hybrids is that they allow for an electric drive-train. That opens up a lot of options for powering the vehicle since the engine doesn't need to physically drive the wheels. Gas turbines, for instance, with the turbine driving a high-RPM generator which eliminates the need for high-ratio reduction gears. Gas turbines, in fact any sort of continuous-combustion engine that doesn't need to be throttled to control it's speed, are more fuel-efficient than traditional IC engines. Add in regenerative braking to recover power and the ability to charge it's own batteries while parked and you get a vehicle that can have a much smaller engine without sacrificing range or performance. Maintenance costs would probably be lower too because with a gas turbine there aren't as many complex moving parts to break and they won't be under as great a strain.

Comment Re:Spoilation is a big deal... (Score 1) 103

Even if the court hasn't ordered it, once you're sued you have an obligation to retain anything which would be relevant to the lawsuit. It's called a litigation hold, and I work in a field where they're common. That obligation supersedes company data retention policies and requests from other parties (including the plaintiff, if the plaintiff eg. uses Outlook's "recall message" feature to try and remove a message they sent us we're required to ignore it and retain that message and the "recall message" request). It isn't supposed to require the plaintiff to prove anything, it's purpose is to preserve evidence that the defendant possesses so it's available to be found through discovery. And it applies the other way as well, the plaintiff is obligated to preserve evidence too because the defendant's entitled to discovery too.

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